Brand Listening and Response Platform Capabilities Survey

At Resource Interactive, our clients frequently ask us, “What social media tools do you recommend?” It’s a tricky question for a couple of reasons:

Every time we’re asked, the request seems to come from a client with an entirely unique set of social media “tool” needs

There are somewhere between an oodle and a gazillion social media tools out there (most of them less than a couple of years old) that bill themselves as some form of social media listening/moderation/response/management tool

The truth is, even if we dive into the first issue deeply, there are so many tools out there, and their capabilities blur and blend into each other so much, that it’s a monumental task to rattle off a solid short list of tools with any confidence.

As such, we’re conducting a broad assessment of social media monitoring and publishing platforms to determine an appropriate classification of tool types, understand the capabilities of the platforms that are available in each area, and identify platforms with whom we would like to engage in deeper discussions so we can make appropriate recommendations to our clients.

Who We’re Evaluating

We’re casting as broad a net as we can, ranging from focused channel-specific “management” tools all the way to broad “pick up the pulse of the ‘net” listening platforms. Jeremiah Owyang compiled a list of the former, while Marshall Sponder published a list of the latter late last year. And, at least once a week, we hear of a new tool or two that fits somewhere in this world. Our current list is at the end of this post.

Broad or Deep?

We’re aiming for this survey to be biased towards broader rather than deeper. As such, we’ve put together an online survey that should take ~15 minutes for a company to complete that covers eight main areas. We do not expect any single tool to cover all areas, but that’s part of the point of this exercise – we want to group these tools according to their core capabilities:

Targeted Listening – the ability to monitor conversations occurring in specific places where a brand may have a presence online, such as a Facebook fan page, a specific Twitter account, or a specific web site

Broad Listening – the ability to comprehensively monitor conversations and content posted across the internet (with filter/query configuration narrowing down the content being monitored based on keywords or other criteria)

Listening Features – the specific capabilities and analysis that the tool performs in an automated fashion (sentiment, keyword-based tagging, etc.)

Publishing Targets – the ability to publish content from within the tool to various social media targets

Brand Response – the ability to react/respond to specific comments, tweets, or posts that are identified through the targeted listening described earlier

Analytics – the ability to provide dashboards and reports

Pricing Options – the different pricing models available for the tool (not specific costs – just how their pricing works)

Response Solicitation

As a first cut, we’re looking to spread the word of this effort via social media itself. Ideally, some of the tools (the “broad listening”-oriented ones) will pick up the mentions of this survey (for the smaller tools, I would expect even a Google Alert would pick this post up for them). So, please, help us get the word out, and leave a comment if you spot any tools missing from our list.

If you are a company that has a platform in this list (or one that isn’t in this list but that we should include), ping me on Twitter at @tgwilson (if you follow me, I’ll follow back within 24 hours and we can DM). Or, you can take the “g” out of my Twitter username and tack “@resource.com” on the end of it to go old-school and shoot me an e-mail. I’ll send you a link to the online survey (we’re not publishing the link so that we can make sure that only official company representatives respond for their products).

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